The guy did this expose, then recants a bit (the pressure of Silicon Valley is that great!) and starts mumbling about stuff that isn't, well, about profits.

So I said, isn't the metrics really about profits, at the end of the day?

And he mumbled some more.

So I said:

But Franisco, you said, just like one of these fake California
self-improvement cults and software human potential cults, "how you
measure yourself," as if this is some kind of human potential exercise,
and not, well, a job. A business. Where you have to work. And make
money.

Um, there's something *else* you would measure
for business besides profits?! Profits are only *a* measurement?! See,
that's why this entire thing is headed for disaster, and already so
disastrous. You act as if start-ups are a spiritual growth opportunity.
You know, "learn about yourself" or "learn from failure" or "network" or
"make a Better World". But that's all crap. All of that is what you do
in your Mom's basement. Less people would go into these silly redundant
doomed-for-failure start-ups if they were more grownup and realized they
had to *make money* and more of them in fact might be useful because
they succeed first of all for the person bothering to start them and
invest them.

There's a way in which the VC cash and the
Ycombinator stuff obscures all these basics of life for people, and
they really do think, like, say, Zaarly, that they can burn through $14
million in VC cash while they have a "learning experience" without
really having made something viable that makes money.

Maybe
the rich people in California would be better off investing in
education as a whole rather than this crash-and-burn start-up culture.
That education could include internships in real businesses.

***

I was kinda sorry to see Zaarly switch course, because what it was doing was actually a sort of more open and better organized Coffee and Power (by our beloved Philip Rosedale). To be sure, the premise was different -- it was about the buyer putting up his interest in buying, which is more of a tugboat for views.

But then it got hard to do the quality control, I guess.

And now I wonder, if I were to put, say, my Second Life store on there, or my translation store on there, whether it would be worth it or whether I could get past the devs' friends in the FIC beta-tester love-fest. I liked Zaarly, so maybe it will work (I saw them at TechCrunch).

Speaking of Philip's latest brain child, I wonder how it is doing. I can't figure it out. I think it changed. Maybe the first rule of Workclub is you don't talk about Workclub, yet everyone is talking about it. It's probably for coders. That other joblist sort of thing that had knitters and dog-walkers was closed?

02/05/2013

I've been thinking today of a word I thought I was inventing when I made a typo on a comment "playment," which I wish would become like "Kleenex" in ten years and enable us to effortlessly, with one click, pay for content online and get creators paid and end the regime of deliberate, engineered Internet copyleftism that has crippled the web for over a decade.

As I've said in the debate on piracy, the copyleftists are concern-trolling when they claim they're trying to get ways for artists to be paid, they just don't want them to involve "ineffective" or "futile" DRM or "prosecutorial overreach" or "chill on speech". Nonsense. They aren't serious, of course, because they don't really believe in capitalism to start with, and you can usually flush that out of them after a few rounds of debate. But they pretend that their entrepreneurial Big IT capitalism exploiting the open source cult is "capitalism" and they pretend that university- or government-funded open source work is entrepreneurial and capitalistic, too, especially if they get consulting fees. It's not a real economy for the rest of us.

CC supporters keep saying that you can't mix "licensing" and "implementation". Of course you can. The Internet mixes things all the time. That's how it gets ahead, routing around.

Google Play isn't playment yet, because you still have to click a few times and still click through to a "shopping card" and credit card information.

But eventually we'll have one-click consumption and payment -- playment.

Right now the closest thing I see to playment is Loren Feldman's site where Tinypass comes up with a 50 cents charge to see a video. This takes you to either your TinyPass account or PayPal which is faster than to Mastercard. Once you make the TinyPass account which is dirt simple, that will speed it up to make your own balance/wallet and then draw it down. This experience is better for the consumer than Google Play.

My only beef with the whole site as it is now is that it kicks up too many emails, in part because Wordpress lets you click to follow, then instead of just accepting that you really wanted to follow, then asks for a confirmation email -- I don't like Wordpress for this and other reasons but I can understand why developers use it because it has all these little modules to plug in.

Tinypass kicks up multiple emails too and this gets annoying, but likely a lot of people want payment confirmation from the payment system AND the pass system. Again, all of this has to get tighter, smoother -- it has to become PLAYMENT. ENJOYMENT.

Playment could operate off your phone and be a wallet, maybe even that Google wallet that never seems to get working and get uptake. The key is micropayments -- a view of a Youtube has to be almost microscopic, but the rewards of tipping a blogger have to be tangible -- and I'm not sure how, except with leader boards and reputational systems that always get gamed. That can be worked on.

Unfortunately, the MIT group come out of the whole "share" mentality" as you can tell right off the bat when they demand "the opening up of walled gardens". Why? People like walled gardens -- that's why Facebook has a billion members and Diaspora has a team whose member committed suicide and who took a lot of Kickstarter cash and didn't do much with it.

If the site is quoting Tim Berners-Lee on "grassroots innovation" as a solution to the Internet's "universality", we're in trouble. This is not the droid we're looking for, because Tim Berners-Lee is the fellow who welded three deep flaws into the Internet:

o failure to protect privacy

o failure to secure intellectual property

o failure to encourage commerce

It's in spite of TBL that the Internet has thrived, not because of him.

Here's why we know we're in trouble with this version of "playment":

The MIT "playment" people are likely to jealously guard their interpretation of this concept.

Playment is establishing a way for consumers *and* sound recording
copyright holders (including both established record companies and
independent recording artists) to share and profit from high quality
digital music and media distributed via internet websites and
peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms as well as via physical media like CD-Rs
and DVD-Rs and portable storage devices like external harddrives and pen
drives.

Playment aims to be the first and defacto standard implementation of the Open Music Model
(OMM) developed at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Playment has
adopted and refined the five fundamental requirements of the OMM and is
working to clearly define aspects pertaining to content metadata
validation (Semantec Web stuff) to facilitate compensation for copyright
owners.

In brief, the key concepts of the OMM are:

Open File Sharing

Open File Formats

Open Membership

Open Payment

Open Competition

But that doesn't mean the rest of the world can't route around them.

Playment shouldn't require open systems or open standards or open anything which actually slow down innovation and put it in the hands of a cranky few code dictators. There can be a thousand walled gardens and different implementation of different standards or even different standards. You don't need Facebook, Twitter, and G+ to talk to each other, you just need them to talk to the third-party payment system that more seamlessly welds in with their system, the way Seamless is now welding in with restaurants so you can order online more easily.

I think one of the problems for why no third-party payment system ever seems to become ubiquitous, except for Paypal, is that none of these giants like Google or Twitter want to enable a third-party payment system to become bigger than them by serving all three or four.

Metadata validation is the problem that the IETF virtual worlds group that was going to make Second Life and There and the Open Sims all "interoperable". That group failed miserable and got occupied and taken over by the US military, a disastrous development that no one except me has protested. People who need simulations of Afghan villages are just more driven and more resourced than people merely toying with virtual worlds with their own money. I constantly objected on the mailing list for this group that they were leaving out the engineering of copy/mod/transfer which they could easily do just as it had been done in SL, and that only ideology was stopping them. There were ways to address the problem of trusted servers and certificates and engineered as well as organic community solutions. The ideological default against them was too great, however.

Real playment has to start with a robust sense of property, not openness; of law, not code; of community, not collectivization.

My hope is that while the MIT technocommunists are tinkering away with their Playment -- they are still looking for seed investors and evidently Mitch Kapor hasn't become interested -- some real business with a real profit motive and not funded professors and students will have the hunger to make this happen.

Playment is going to have to be about wallets and about in a sense a phone meter but one that doesn't seem to drain the pocketbook and doesn't make the consumer feel that he has yet another high gadget/Internet bill coming in -- it has to have a lot of choice to it.

I'm encouraged by the way I saw Facebook log-on for comments appear everywhere on blogs and become almost the industry standard until TechCrunch went back on this very good way to do things and put in Livefyre, which I've criticized deeply.

TC did this because their comments -- and traffic -- fell off when they had identity. They tried to be noble about it and make it seem like they were willing to gut it out while a better sort of people came to the site (and I would add, especially more women, which is a demographic that won't comment in an environment with tekkie assholes being anonymously nasty).

But they weren't really noble because AOL needed the traffic, so they've now let in Lifefyre which takes Twitter and Disqus log-ons which can be anonymous.

I still think Disqus is good if you have anonymous because it builds up a record you can see with a click and it's very easy to use and manage.

Anyway, the appearance of third-party commenting platforms lets me hope there will be third-party payment solutions that seamlessly -- like Seamless -- get us to real playment, not like the MIT Playment.

02/02/2013

My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.

Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers. How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.

I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?

Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.

Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.

Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here,here and here. He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.

Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and
trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going
to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.

I might make my income each month by translating something online
from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in
another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour
turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital
furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog
ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is
unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.

I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my
apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously
polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and
electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued
to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a
plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN
or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters
have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up,
collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this
technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the
digital dust.

We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require
letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a
month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of
errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second
Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for
micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature
of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very,
very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are
*coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a
Better World.

I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after
the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I
chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the
Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health
insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.

The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we
pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new
oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe
clicking on a belly fat ad.

Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems
be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs
out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think
that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in
the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free
enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s
“capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.

***

Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.

Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and
communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant
populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under
communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under
socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism
— she isn't.

In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real
life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the
lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many
fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or
retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into
more and more time or space slivers.

Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.

Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.

Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...

Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.

The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.

Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.

01/24/2013

UMD miniMBA Social Media Panel

Details at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/miniMBA2.0/courses.aspxSocial Social Media MarketingMarketing strategy has been revolutionized by the rise of social
networks, real-time tools like Twitter and Facebook, user-generated
content (e.g., blogging) and a shift in consumer attention to new
media. Old paradigms of word of mouth marketing, viral strategy,
consumer targeting, brand and reputation management are being
radically altered for this business 2.0 phenomenon. The course will
address key strategic and tactical aspects of social media marketing,
using examples and techniques from corporations, election campaigns,
and recent startups. The strategic themes focus on the business case
for using various social media approaches and examples of successes
and failures. The tactical aspects will introduce participants to the
capabilities and uses of individual technologies through case examples
and hands-on exercises.

I put all the details of this picture from Flickr because it lets you know how social media marketers morphed to political marketers and then won the election for Obama. Above is Obama's Digital Director, Teddy Goff, formerly of Blue State Digital. We will come back to him at the end.

You know that Silicon Valley saying, "If you are not paying for it, you are the product."

I think most people don't care very much about this and feel if they get a free product like Facebook or Linked-In, with maybe some premium options, they don't care. That is basically the social bargain.

I do think it's always worth peering at the business model, however, especially as the free/freemium platforms' business model always involves you working for free and often supplying free content, too.

A tweet fell into my vision from my feed from a guy named Ross Dawson, one of those typical newfangled Internet gurus who is famous for being famous and who tells you he is "sought after" and "in demand" as a speaker and consultant. It may be so.

You know, I haven't clicked on that visualization of Dawson's neural activity -- I prefer to see if it is evidenced on Twitter for now.

So Ross was having a Twitchat and I decided to ask him a question.

He had begun breathlessly, but had few takers:

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

In 23 hours I will be doing a Twitter #crowdchat on Crowd Business Models - tune in if interested! http://bit.ly/11N5W1G

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

A "crowd business model" is a business model based on participation and value creation by many, often outside the company #crowdchat

So I asked if these companies were profitable -- I figured to start with that. Answer:

@catfitz most of the companies on our Crowd Business Models visual are profitable. Jigsaw mentioned earlier sold for $140m

So, not all of them are.

My next question was to ask what the crowd gets paid. But his talk was over before you knew it.

If you look at Jigsaw, you get the answer: of course the crowd doesn't get paid. The crowd is relied upon to upload business cards of other people -- without their permission -- to fill up the data bases and create the service. They use it and get something out of it. They pay for premium accounts/advertising/consulting whatever -- although we never learn if this company *made a profit* on its own, running its business; it is so telling that in the hustle and shill of Silicon Valley, it is described as "making a profit" merely if it is sold to another entrepreneur and its original venture capitalists take a cashout. It's never about *the company*.

Salesforce, a much more gigantic and older and successful company that does customer service and all kinds of other things for companies found it in their interests to buy out a competitor. The data is criticized as being sloppy/erroneous/not with customer's approval. The New York Times wrote enthusiastically four years ago.

Jigsaw may disappear into the mists of Salesforth's maws, another little piece of the delusional history of the dotocom and web 2.0 manias. But for Ross Dawson, it's Exhibit No. 1. Jigsaw figured out how to get all those sales people out there to input data of those they were targeting in exchange for getting their peers' data -- and they could pay to access more for $25, or as a corporation, get unlimited access (the way LinkedIn, like an old Oriental Bazaar, makes you pay bakshish into the palms of Reid Hoffman, in order to make a connection to another person who might advance you in life; sometime, if it doesn't exist already, we will see the relationships reduced to commodities as they are in Russia or China, where you pay money not just for introductions; you pay money to get the job itself, as a bribe.)

So all those middle-class sales drones input data for free into this service, paid a little to get more of it out, and put $142 million cash into the hands of Jim Fowler, the owner, when he sold it to Salesforce. Great work if you can get it -- and he did, by not doing it, because you did.

Ross Dawson has a point to make:

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

Q9) we will see a dramatic rise in crowd-based businesses. In addition many established orgs will start to tap crowds in earnest #crowdchat

I had more questions, but it was hard to find answers about those other profit-making companies and what the user really got out of it (do we ever learn what percentage of LinkedIn premium users get actual jobs?).

Dawson joins headliner Teddy Goff at the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday 13 February. Goff is the groundbreaking Digital Director of President Obama’s data-driven 2012 re-election campaign. Teddy Goff’s team harnessed data effectively to fundraise a ground breaking US$690 million, build online followings of more than 78 million people, and register more than a million people to vote in the largest online promotion programme in political history.

So, while Kim Dotcom was rolling out his new company in New Zealand, having fled American justice to his empire in NZ, and was twitting the content industry once again by encouraging uploads of content while he looked the other way and collected fees and ad revenue, Obama's digital director, head of Obama's "data driven" win, was breaking bread at an Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast.

My mind boggles at things like that. Obama's ICE and prosecutors are trying to round up Kim Dotcom. He eludes their capture and eludes the NZ law-enforcers as well and the FBI are left bungling and fuming.

The smart thing to do then is to start to say to New Zealand, "Look, we understand you have your laws and all, and you need to respect civil rights and perhaps you haven't, but Kim Dotcom is wanted for piracy, we still have an indictment out, and we think maybe what would be appropriate because you keep refusing to cooperate in his extradition now is for us to cease to do business with you."

That's how technologists themselves do it.

Instead, Obama's Digital Director flies to New Zealand the week of Dotcom's rollout (was he in the audience for the big show? I bet he was!), and breakfasts with Air New Zealand, which is of course one of NZ's biggest businesses getting US revenue.

It's at moments like this that I realize Kim Dotcom will never be extradited during the Obama Administration.

Once, at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I confronted venture capitalist (venture communist?) Fred Wilson, and asked him why Silicon Valley was so destructive in the name of its cherished "disruption," why so many start-ups were burned through and passed around from VC to VC like baubles on expensive chains -- companies never seem to go public and reach the state of self-sufficiency (this was before the Groupon and Facebook IPOs, but look how they turned out...).

And Fred Wilson, who is a very thoughtful and philosophical man, conceded this problem. "The revolution eats his children," he said matter-of-factly. He meant in the larger sense, Web 2.0 and its discontents in general, but I've often taken it literally about the burn-out cult of open source software.

Because there's the obvious fact of the entire open-source cult and shill -- how idealistic and enthusiastic young men -- it's mainly young men -- are persuaded to burn themselves out like shooting stars trying to "create value." And how their efforts are sucked up for free by Big IT, which is able to incorporate their free labour and free products into larger consulting businesses or more complex proprietary IT systems from which they make billions. The start-ups generally create only free web sites or services or aps -- and everyone voraciously consumes them. The selfless hero-coders surviving on Red Bull and chips and living in crowded walk-up squats to fulfill their dream are somehow supported with life's needs -- friends, parents, university, maybe even the occasional big infusion from a VC, or a contest win. Yet the wreckage is big and the product is slim. Few start-ups succeed; even those that do are consumed and disappear into bigger companies (that revolution eating again) and then even those big companies falter (Zynga).

Few people will discuss the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirsky, one of the founders of Diaspora, which was to be the free and open-source alternative to Facebook, that hated "walled garden" based on proprietary code which still nevertheless enables "hooks" into its service for app engineers. There was just aA brief discussion on Y-combinator -- one of the VC companies that fuels the revolution that eats its children so heartily -- and then that founder, a Russian man, fell into obscurity with no questions asked about what happened, whether related to personal or public matters. Everybody who donated money or time to Diaspora -- and they were considerable -- lost, because Diaspora was "returned to the community" by which the cultists mean they stop working on a failed project and let it die unless somebody else feels like picking up its carcass.

WARNING: I'M NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT

Warning: I don't believe that you are required not to criticize the dead and that you must abide by some ancient mourning period of 7 days or 14 days or 30 days before you can speak critically of public figures. I also don't believe -- as with Benghazi -- that you are bound by some ancient notion of blasphemy, that you can't question the policies of the dead or their supporters. I don't believe that you somehow can't debate the ideas and life of a figure merely because he just died or that this is "politicizing" his death -- the insane hagiography and the exploitation of this young man to advance the big guys' technocommunist agenda is far more of a politicization. And yes, this means I will even argue with his mom, who obviously doted on him and supported his cause -- because he's a public figure and public policies are shaped by his life and death.

Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. Just as did Guy Debord, the French philosopher of the 1960s generation whose quote graces the top of this blog. Just as people in extreme ideologies tend to do -- which is why such ideologies based on destruction of the old and glorification of the unreal new aren't so recommended for the young by their wiser elders.

DIGITAL THEFT IS STILL STEALING; HACKING IS CRIME

I was a big critic of Aaron Swartz because I find hacking to be common vandalism, theft and -- when it's large-scale and driven by leftist political ambitions -- a form of terrorism.

Right now, with the geeks ruling the earth, and especially Twitter and the tech media and blogosphere, we're likely to see a huge outpouring of self-righteous and self-justifying bunkum around the death of this young man, and I think it's important to try to counter the lies.

What Aaron Swartz did *was* wrong and *was* theft -- breaking and entering into a university with false ID and using tools to pry open doors and stealing 4 million JSTOR articles -- therefore undermining the JSTOR business. (I don't listen to silly arguments about how stealing a copy of something where the original remains "isn't stealing" because of course it is -- it's about stealing the bundled, inherent commodification feature of content that is perfectly fine for digital content to have. Hacking is all about deliberately breaking and destroying that commercial inherency.)

I BLAME LESSIG, NOT THE DOJ FOR SWARTZ'S DEATH

Whenever someone commits suicide, they themselves are the first ones to blame. Sometimes suicide is murder -- it is anger and settling scores and trying to make survivors feel guilty; it's the ultimate temper tantrum to get your way, you know? Even so, people tend to feel sorry for suicides and find someone else in the larger picture to blame. In this case, the geeks making Aaron Swartz into an instant overnight saint because he offed himself consistent with his nihilist belief (like Debord) are blaming The Man or the Department of Justice for continuing to bring suit against him.

I blame not the Department of Justice for Aaron Swartz's death in that sense, but Lawrence Lessig. He's the one who, like Pan, lured this young men into his extremist and delusional cult of Creative Communism as I called it, with the shill that somehow human nature and the earth can be re-made merely by being digitalized and moved online.

It's can't be. Not only is human nature not reformable in the way these delusional ideologues imagine; human society with its institutions, values and the rule of law so arduously established do not need to be remade in order to have progress, freedom, and human rights for all. Revolution destroys institutions that it believes need to be refashioned, but usually along the way the extremists justify the utopian end with criminal means -- and thus bring about a society very different from the freedom and equality they promised. (Of course, there's the mass crimes of humanity of the Bolsheviks, but fresher in the memory: like the 1960-iers in Paris, drunk and covered with lice, finally removed from the university bastions who eventually flamed out after spending years in the cafes drunk and publishing little magazines on the dime of exploitative rich publishers. Or like our own beatniks and hippies like Jack Kerouac or Richard Brautigan, the wonder children of the former Beatnik and Hippie ages, the former who died of alcoholism and the latter who committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle alone in a cabin).

THE MEGABUS TO INTERNET FREEDOM FALLACY

Once I saw Swartz in the Megabus line to Boston. Like me, he was having to Megabus it because he was evidently poor, despite all his selling of companies and such. Even so, I was so furious at thinking about how nevertheless, Daddy or some rich person who was able to pay for his lawyer was able to spring him from serious felony charges that I almost went up to him to tell him a piece of my mind. What stopped me was that I could see that he was just a skinny young kid and wouldn't be able to fight. Like so many Internet freaks, he would just see me as a crazy cat lady telling him to get off of my e-lawn, and wouldn't be able to muster the intellectual strength and historical context to have any kind of informed debate. He was a cult victim. The Internet Revolution has produced lots of them. Many more than we are told come to no good end.

Comrade Larry's utopian notion that you can get millions of people to give up the inherent commodity value of their own creations, the inherent value of commerce, by prodding and even brow-beating them into putting Creative Commons "licenses" on the content, is at the heart of this sickness.

As I've often pointed out, there's no license that says "copy this but pay me something". That's deliberate. That's because Lessig wants digital communism, no matter what he says about his own personal beliefs or whatever silly counter-arguments people pull out about him (such as the fact that he once clerked for a Republican judge). Collectivizing content and then making it available as the loss-leader for giant platformistas to make their millions lets us know how the communism actually turns out. It's supposed to enable creators to "get the word out" (as if sales wouldn't achieve the same thing!); it's supposed to create commuuuunity; but in fact what it leads to is Facebook and Twitter and Google slurping up all the value from ad clicks and related revenue streams of data-drilling as people make and consume largely free content.

This could have all been different with the addition of a single license that enabled people easily to get paid on line and to tip and buy from others for their blogs; the payments system could be easily engineered as is for PayPal or Amazon.

All that stood in the way was ideology -- the kind of ideology that furiously drove Aaron Swartz and ultimately led to his death in despair.

YES, BREAKING AND ENTRY IS A CRIME

Violet Blue forgets to tell us that Aaron Swartz deliberately shielded his face with a bike helmut and broke into a computer closet physically -- it's amazing how that detail of physical breaking and entry gets left out in all the digital hagiographies. He used false ID. And he took something of value that JSTOR required to keep its operation afloat. It's ok to charge money for a product EVEN IF you already got paid for it in a research grant, because the system itself of storage and sorting and cataloging and management needs to have a revenue stream. In fact, students get most of JSTOR for free! In fact, most people find students to fetch things behind the JSTOR pay-wall all the time (Evgeny Morozov is famous for doing this on twitter).

And then, ultimately, JSTOR undid the communists and their delusions by releasing 4 million articles -- about as many as Swartz stole. It did so without breaking its business model of charging for content. Did that plunge the technocommunist into despair further?

The accounts of his last days in the tech press are filled with self-righteous, furious accounts of his legal struggles. If Daddy couldn't pay for the lawyer, then Larry Lessig's wife did, and was busy raising money for him. Swartz had no shortage of Big IT supporters, as he was the poster boy for the technocommunist approach -- but maybe they let him down (that would be no surprise and not news).

Violet Blue writes the annoying nonsense that we'll see on a zillion blogs:

Demand Progress
- itself an organization focused on online campaigns dedicated to
fighting for civil liberties, civil rights, and progressive government
reform - compared The Justice Department's indictment of Swartz to
"trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out
of the library."

But, um, you can't take "too many books" out of the library, dears. The library doesn't let you. There's a limit. It might be 5 or 8 or whatever depending on the library and whether you owe in fines. There is a limit on hard copies; there's no reason not to have a limit on digital copies to preserve a business model that is okay to have if you're not a communist.

Redditt, often described as having been founded by Swartz although the story is complicated, is now called "the front page of the Internet" and far more important than the dying Digg to shape traffic on the web as well as news and views. But Redditt is a horrid, bullying cess-pool run by anonymous assholes much of the time and no proud achievement. And Swartz was forced to sell out of Redditt to make a living, but also because there is no viable business plan for any of these entities, ever, and even those who sell them regret it.

See, people like Lessig evidently love to take young idealistic men whose enthusiasm is fueled by the fact that they suffer from various disorders -- whether autism spectrum or bipolar or whatever -- and whip them into frenzies. That they are of age and willingly go along with the cult doesn't make it somehow "better".

Why? Because like all older men, they need company. Their own flawed utopian ideals are more visibly flawed if they can't attract the children to them...

If the DOJ sought to "make an example" of Aaron Swartz, there is also one thing to blame for that: the entire Google-fueled and Electronic Frontier Foundation-fueled frenzy against any form of legislation whatsoever that would regulate the Internet -- like SOPA or PIPA.

One of the key reasons I supported SOPA was because I believe real-life law applies online, and that the Internet is not a special, holy, exempt place (which is how Lessig and his cult followers viewed it). It needs to be under the rule of law, and that means something like SOPA that in fact legitimately criminalizes and penalizes piracy on a mass scale for commercial reasons, and therefore defines what is not to be prosecuted but merely technically thwarted or discouraged with removals, i.e. a video on a teenager's Tumblr blog. In the outrageous noise around SOPA, it's hard to get across the simple notion that case law -- precedent under the Supreme Court and lower courts -- will build up the rule of law that will both prevent abuses by police or ICE in over-reach, will not place a chill on speech, but which will enable content creators and IP owners to have livelihoods and businesses on the Internet -- which shouldn't be some zone exempt from human law and human enterprise in the organic world. That's all.

You would think it was advocating the massacre of innocent babies, but my support for SOPA is based on that simple premise: definitions in law, definitions backed up by court rulings, establishment the rule of law over the Internet and in fact work to prevent the need for frustrated officials to "make examples". We will never know now how Swartz's case could have been tried but there's no question in my mind that if SOPA had passed and provided definitions, anyone who didn't make a commercial benefit from their theft would not be facing the kind of heavy sentences that the tech press hysterically claimed Swartz would suffer (and which I don't at all believe he would suffer, given his massive cult backing, and the capacity for the liberal and leftist tech media to make a circus).

And it's irresponsible for bloggers to keep screaming that Swartz would "face 50 years" (as Declan McCullagh is outrageously insisting) when there were mitigating circumstances, among which was the fact that JSTOR itself was not pressing charges and he did not monetarize the content he stole. It is right and just that he would have gotten some kind of punishment that most likely would have amounted to community service or at most a year in jail; this would hardly have been 35 years.

THE DEATH CULT OF TECHNOCOMMUNISM

What Swartz's suicide should prompt people like Lessig and Cory Doctorow to do is to ask themselves: why are we continuing to peddle the death cult of technocommunism? Why are we sending young men to their doom, to arrest or despair and even suicide? You cannot eradicate commerce from human beings through collectivism; people need to live. Someone is always getting paid and someone is always the product in these "free" collectives -- why is it us and why are the coders the first to be sacrified with their zeal?And it is more than fine for the state to protect private property: this *is* the system -- unlike their communism -- that ensures the best life and freedom for all.

And it's not as if their technocommunism leads to any actual socialist paradise. Why do only the Big IT companies make billions, why do only the venture capitalists get their exits, but nobody else does? Why can't people -- users -- get paid? Why can't Redditt cost $19.95 a month and why can't I tip commenters? This is a revolution largely on the backs of the coders like Swartz. Their selfless dedication to the cause of "the open Internet" is supposed to be waged even unto death, and Swartz's death will be exploited only to celebrate this death-cult of collectivization even more. Why, oh, why?

As with the Newtown massacre, much will be discussed about the role of depression, autism spectrum, mental illness in this death as therefore somehow exonerating any ideological issues. But that's nonsense; as I said before, people like Lessig are all too happy to exploit the meglomania of the bipolar and the obsessive-compulsiveness of the autism spectrum in their open source cult -- and that's morally reprehensible. They have made an entire cult and culture out of the "neurally atypical" and celebrated it as "evolution".

Lawrence Lessig and Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow and Cory Doctorow should be the ones having a dark night of the soul over this man's death and questioning their utopia, along with all their tech press celebrators. But this won't happen, in the din of thousands of tech bloggers pumping themselves up to red fury now blaming The Man for his death and doubling down on their technocommunist revolution. More young people will head off the cliff...

Y-combinators will continue the deadly cycle and feed the revolution, and keep telling themselves its about a security state fighting a dying industry. Nonsense. Technocommunism is inhuman and based on false premises -- its results are before us.

Throughout the film, we’ve seen various desperate attempts to change the
system by ignoring the usual rules: Batman originally thought he could
inspire change by being a cultural exemplar, but only ended up causing a
bunch of kids to get themselves hurt by dressing up as him. Dent
thought he could clean up the system by pushing righteously from the
inside, but ended up cutting more and more ethical corners until his own
personal obsessions ended up making him a monster. The Joker had by far
the most interesting plan: he hoped to out-corrupt the corrupters, to
take their place and give the city “a better class of criminal”.

And the crazy thing is that it works! At the end of the movie, the
Joker is alive, the gangsters and their money launderers are mostly
dead, and their money has been redistributed (albeit though the
deflationary method of setting it on fire). And, as we see from the
beginning of the third movie, this is a fairly stable equilibrium: with
politicians no longer living in fear of the gangsters, they’re free to
adopt tough anti-crime policies that keep them from rising again.3

The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the
villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is
actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one
innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for
Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also
terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve
into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects
it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.

Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.

11/17/2012

If you are on G+ and you heard certain Google engineers crowing about Harper Reed, the wunderkind that ran Obama's Big Data get-out-the-vote (GOTV) machine, it didn't take long to find Harper's feed and see a big old photo of election night with none other than Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in the foreground. On Instagram, he confirms in person that this is Schmidt.

Harper -- whose connections include Joi Ito who runs the entire Internet and Richard Daly who runs Chicago -- isn't a former Google engineer as far as I can tell, but his networks contain Google engineers who adore him. And Schmidt could have spent election night with the champagne bucket almost anywhere, even just at home, and still win -- but he chose to come to Chicago and spend it with the geeks on the campaign. In every single way, this is Google's election -- and the election of Facebook, Twitter, and other big companies that created social media -- and then mined it for the Democrats' GOTV data to win.

History will record that the geeks first created the giant fishing nets of free social media that everyone joined; then they strained out of all of us our deep personal data about preferences and profiles and beliefs; then we were told this was for marketing products we would like, you know, like yoghurt or shampoo; then it was all used as Big Data in an election campaign. All within the space of about five years. We went from social media (open) to Big Data (closed) all while being told soothing things about open-source software and the evils of those "walled gardens" of Facebook whose overlords wouldn't always let competing engineers get hooks into data. They did anyway.

Very few people are really contemplating this outrageous totalitarian grab at our freedoms and taking any serious notice of it. If I were the Republicans, I'd insist on a Congressional hearing about election technology immediately, once they get done pawing over Paula Broadwell's purloined emails and photos of burnt buildings in Benghazi. Although they are all related: the Internet is to blame for every bit of it! (Videos on Youtube, gmail folders.)

I suspect this will never happen; some Republicans want to learn why their tech team messed up; most don't. Meanwhile, the Democrats don't want anyone to look at them too closely; the election- campaign geek NDA and Dashboard data have replaced "classified" as something more secret than State Department's cables, which those geeks could hack anyway.

Alex wrote "How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection". They did this not for money, as they took pay-cuts, but love -- and I would argue vanity, and the desire for influence, if not power.

Harper is famous for being vain; he writes frankly on his G+ profile, "I am awesome". And he is, as only a Burner, a geek, a start-up guru, and a Singularist can be. His resume has all the known geek stuff in it, and a gap year between April 2010-April 11. I wondered about that gap. Seminars at Singularity University? Secret consultations with Googlers over how to take over the world?

Reed was at Threadless until 2009, then moved to Rackspace for a couple of months, after which he worked on personal projects and advised startups like SugarSnap and Tap Me, while working on personal projects like CTAAlerts.com and Supertrackr.com.

Other resume high points and lifestream data points (he's a prolific lifestreamer, but that hides what he actually did in that gap year lol)

o Seth Godin -- who I calmly call a totalitarian for his awful views on how to govern society -- he worked with Seth at Squidoo

o Singularity -- which I also very normally call fascism/technocommunism, and now I finally have company, and of all things, from NPR. Reed sniffs at the FUD and claims it's all much more nuanced. It's not. This is a very red flag. His arguments of feigned incrementalism and such against NPR's legitimate points are all very lame but with his Nate-Silvers-like cult of personality now, it will be hard for people to stand up to him.

Pruning – kind of like a bonsai tree. It’s knowing when to remove someone from your community. Hire problem solvers and fire the non-problem solvers, or guide non-problem solvers to be more productive. Take away: don’t be a pussy.

Butt heads constantly – Argue towards truth. Arguing is very important and leads to clarity. Don’t be afraid to butt heads when solving problems.

No, this is not a culture you want to grow. It's a totalitarian culture. It is not liberal or democratic. It has no due process. It runs on sheer gut to make the cuts of those "nonproblem solvers" who are merely eliminated on the basis of various cultural and mental cues. In real life, you can't eliminate dissenters and those who "don't produce" or "get in the way"; you have to manage them fairly as a president.

Paige Craig · Top Commenter · CEO & Co-Founder at BetterWorksYo Harper - couple ideas for ya bud:1) How bout Obama and the brain trust all get on Quora (hell, maybe even all of congress).2) Can we get rid of those ridic travel budgets and get Obama & team to use AirBnB.3) Access to presidential parties requires a high Klout score.4) Can we get a GroupOn or LivingSocial special on for the Lincoln Bedroom so us avg Joe's have a chance ;).

Yes, it's all in jest, but Sergei Brin isn't kidding when he says he wants to eliminate political parties and just have "independents" all just, you know, chat and use Google search and hangouts to run stuff.

Zeynep Tufecki, who is one of the lefty sociologists on social media who I constantly polemicize with (one-sidedly, as she simply won't let my comments through and ignores me), who was happy to praise Twitter for their censorship-by-country plan, at least stepped up and filed this op-ed piece showing concern about Big Data and manipulation in campaigns. That's because she's to the left of Obama considerably. I criticize her in the comments for being too gingerly.

I hadn't realized that the Siroker resume went back to Google like so many -- well, there you have it. What company isn't better positioned to give you data on every single person on the Internet in America and what they search for?

I don't know why Mother Jones, even with the Romney aspect, don't ask more about this creepy stuff:

Dan Siroker, who took a leave of absence from Google to work as director of analytics for the campaign, employed A/B testing to figure out which combination of images, text, and videos were most likely to compel BarackObama.com visitors to reach for their credit cards. (Siroker now provides those services to a vast array of commercial and political clients—including Mitt Romney's campaign and Mother Jones—through his company, Optimizely.) All told, Siroker estimated A/B testing boosted OFA's fundraising by $100 million, 20 percent of its online haul.

In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama's role in the auto bailout—or Romney's outsourcing past. A ProPublica analysis revealed that a single OFA fundraising email came in no less than 11 different varieties.

So in other words, the campaign can deliberately lie about its platform by selectively presenting it.

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."

This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

Did you see that video where Obama thanks Harper Reed and all the other staff and volunteers? He even sheds tears in it. I clicked on this video already viewed by 8 million, hoping that at last I might see an emotional and unscripted Obama. But instead, it seemed like the zombie apocalypse -- as always, he seemed as if the coat hanger had been left in his jacket and a stick had been put down his throat making him able to speak only in controlled bursts. The tears seemed to squeeze out of him on cue, as if one of the techies was nearby with a hidden bulb and syringe.

I've talked endlessly in recent posts about the Romney campaigns problems with Orca and the dilatory tech journos who won't really cover them -- although they'll gush endlessly about the details of Obama's tech. Mother Jones summarizes what was right with Obama's campaign in tech terms:

REED REPRESENTS an approach to technology that distinguishes the Obama campaign from its counterpart in Boston. Whereas Romney has outsourced much of his data-focused operations, this time around Team Obama—which has been advised by representatives from Google and Facebook, according to Bloomberg Businessweek—is trying to emulate a start-up atmosphere in hopes of fostering the kind of innovation rarely associated with stuffy political shops. Fewer consultants, more in-house geeks.

Reed is passionate about open source software you read everywhere. But he's not passionate about open *systems* like a market and going into a marketplace to get services based on merit, and he's certainly not passionate about open society and protection of minorities who dissent against "benevolent dictators". He and the other coders were all friends before they came to Obama's campaign and all chat on Twitter. The start-up and inhouse atmosphere in fact means tight, totalitarian task forces where the benevolent dictator rules -- I'm almost resigned to the fact that this will spread now to the rest of public life...

It already has -- among the features of Obama's tech tools was "gamification" where people competed with others or their own best record. Obama was told at one point that they had knocked on 300,000 plus doors in Ohio.

This is the kind of system that absolutely cries out for pripiska -- and pripiska will enter into it sooner or later. That's the "fudging" of numbers that Soviet workers used to do in the field when they were constantly under pressure to show progress on various break-neck, Stakhanovite projects. In the Obama campaign, it didn't matter if the numbers were fake because by broadcasting them, they could GOTV.

At some point the bubble bursts, the edifice crashes and even the coders "have the Obama campaign in their rear-view mirror" as one coder says who now is having to find a job if his previous employer won't take him back after 18 months' absence. Not to worry, Rootscamp is coming up with a job fair for all these people and we know where they will go first: into government with gov 2.0 budgets sprouting to give them jobs.

11/16/2012

Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica believes he's closed the case -- mumbling that some "staff" of the Romney campaign and "volunteers" coded the mess that was Orca -- and never really confirming anything or naming names. Obviously, the firms cited that received campaign money for their services answered that they were under an NDA and couldn't talk.

Funny how Obama's devs who were undoubtedly under an NDA as well could blab as much as they wanted about their work lol.

This reminds me of the way it's awfully hard sometimes to find the source of Russian news stories because the little papers are shamelessly copied by the larger papers and some big national paper may have utterly stolen from a little one and made it seem as if it were its own.

Zac spins the fail of the app by noting that the notification app was merely the shell for another piece of software that was later pushed to help people file Romney support messages on social media. Except...people like me don't want dopey pre-fabbed content from dweebs in a campaign -- if I want to write something in support of Romney's ideas I write it myself on Facebook or blogs. I never once clicked on the Facebook ads for Romney simply because my vote for Romney is not about the Republican Party and I don't want Facebook to start pushing that at me and making tht part of my digital footprint.

The spin on this app is that it still was in the top apps downloaded
from the Apple store and still notified at least the Romney supporters
who weren't "glued to Drudge 24/7" when the VP pick was made because
they aren't necessarily news junkies but just want a personal
notification.

Hmm, that's not good enough, because they promised
it was going to be special. And why couldn't it be? Oh, maybe getting
the outsourced shop in Arkansas coordinated with the social media shop
in Alexandria, VA coordinated with the Bostin digital director...and
then literally Paul Ryan and Romney themselves -- oh, maybe it was all
too hard. Why? An app is a speedy thing. If they took their principle
and had him stand at the mike at the right time, so to speak, it could
have gone from Romney's lips to our ears before the Times. Truly. Why
didn't it? What Romney got out of it was a big data haul with all our
names and zip codes and maybe some donations. But we got a failed app.
Just making a prettily designed app that works fast and downloads
properly for people isn't enough; there has to be the content and the
candidate connection, for real.

When you study Rockfish and it's story, you can instantly see the pattern I've kept highlighting -- the Romney decision
to get boutique firms that have clients from Johnson and Johnson to
Wal-mart -- and that perform on a political campaign like it's a brand of
shampoo. The best that money can buy.

Interestingly -- FASCINATINGLY, given the arduous discussion at Ars Technica, in making this failed app for the big-spending Romney
campaign, this company HASTENED to distance themselves from the
Republican brand:

"This mobile app wasn't our idea," said Rockfish Founder Kenny Tomlin.
"They wanted to do it and came to us to build it. Which we were excited
about ... and they've been great to work with. But we have no intention
of politics becoming a focus of our business; we're just a technology
partner. We're not a digital strategy agency for the RNC."

Is
it ANY WONDER when you have a guy like Kenny Tomlin who is distancing
himself as fast as he can in print from Romney so as to keep all his
business options only, that the app FAILED? And failed -- for all your
literalists and Fiskers out there -- not necessarily because it wasn't
pretty and downloadable and nominally worked, and not necessarily because Tomlin didn't support the GOP, but because nobody
coordinated the day of show to get the job done right or to have
interesting content in it after the flop and put the entire job in the context of campaigning with spirit.

Interestingly,
Kenny Tomlin makes the exact points I've been making -- and admits --
big-time! -- that you need party enthusiasm or at least not sabotage:

In the current realm of political advertising, general-market agencies
don't do much political work. One reason is that general-market agency
employees might resist working for a candidate of a particular party.
Another reason is that political campaigns find non-political ad
agencies too slow to work with in the heat of a campaign.

"I wasn't worried about alienating employees because it's just a small
team working on the business," said Mr. Tomlin. "I wasn't going to ask
someone to work on a Mitt Romney mobile app if they hate Republicans.
And just like every agency, there are brands and companies you work with
that not everyone in the agency likes, but you find the people within
who are passionate about it and put them on the business."

Oh. Is that how you do it, Kenny? Really? Say, I have the forums just for you: Ars Technica. Go and talk to all the brains there who will tell you that you shouldn't approach this issue with such discrimination! Why, you should explain that you don't understand their funny squeamishness and ridiculous political correctness! You should tell them that you would handle the obvious problem of coders and digital artists not liking candidates by not giving them the job. You get why you can't give them the job.

Well if you have to
segregate your staff that way and make some of them drink out of
different water fountains, how can you be sure the entire shop pulls
together to get the job done? OH YOU CAN'T BECAUSE IT FAILED. Who's the person in your shop that *does* hate Republicans that you have to keep these jobs away from them? Do we have to worry? (And what do you know about the AMERCIA accident?)

11/15/2012

Well, if it seemed bad enough that it seems Romney had Al Gore's developer on his aps, and Obama voters in his digital shops who may have not been that much into Romney, but it can and does get worse: Romney's digital director Zac Moffatt hired Obama's 2008 director of analytics Dan Siroker -- the dude that does the A/B tests. I'll bet there will be more coming out of that nature, and when we finally get the story of who really worked on Orca and how they worked on it, we may know more.

I will continue my operating hypothesis here: Democratic developers -- taken right from Obama's past campaign and Al Gore's past campaign -- plus Obama supporters -- did not have the requisite enthusiasm, follow-up and sustainability to benefit Romney's campaign and the Republican Party in the future.

I continue to ask whether they sabotaged Romney's digital work -- and by sabotage I mean some act on a continium from deliberately hacking to simply letting things fail through neglect or indifference or spite.

My pursuit of these questions does not in any way mean that I think Orca caused Romney's downfall -- not when the candidate himself doesn't mention anything remotely like technology as a problem, but makes the rather intolerant suggestion that he lost because he didn't have "stuff" to give away to certain constituencies, like Obama did.

But this is a larger issue to pursue for plurality in our country, and I think the Republican party, especially given the tremendous amount of money it did attract for this campaign, including even my little $28 for the first time in my life, has to get accountability on the tech here.

Any human resources person in any political campaign in the land will instantly grasp that the notion of hiring your political rivals' devs is not a good idea, after this debacle.

In fact, each and every one of the firms involved in this debacle should be working to make some persuasive PR statements that they are impartial and professional and work for any client or they cannot be trusted. Even if they make those statements -- and they aren't making them as they don't care or are afraid -- wouldn't take away the sting. Every single operative in every single Republican stronghold related to all things digital has to absorb the lesson of this campaign: keep it all in your own pew and play close attention to the geeks.

You know, that's what Obama did, and he won. He built everything inhouse. He used the top people from different firms, but they were ardent supporters who wanted him to win and gave it their all.

That didn't happen for Romney, and while you could cynically say that's because he's not attractive as a one percenter, dissing the 47% not his constituents, you do have to have a wider concern for how democracy will be achieved in our digital age.

I'm going to keep on commenting on this awful story of the failure of the tech side of Romney's campaign because it has lessons not only for Republican campaigns, but lessons about the larger issue of how we can get reliable, impartial and neutral tools for democracy via the Internet from an ethics-free and cynical geek class that feels no stake in political parties and their concerns.

If you don't think this is a fair characterization of geekdom, well, hear it from the Geek-in-Chief himself, Sergey Brin, who said on G+, on the eve of the elections, that he wishes there were no political parties at all, but just a lot of independents. Gosh, that sounded like a lovely fairy-tale until you saw Sergei's circle-friends offering to flesh out that dream by making Google run a platform for everybody to implement this lovely dream, oh, presumably by clicking up propositions that those nice geeks make up for you.

I should have thought to go to Pandodaily.com first with this because they are more independent than TechCrunch obviously, and bring some of that same thoughtfulness to reporting that TechCrunch used to have (when they were there).

It’s hard to challenge the marketplace, because the marketplace is always innovating. The Obama campaign has a hubris based on the thinking that the only way to win is to build everything in house. They have a lot more engineers than us, yes. But they think that they have the only people that understand big data and social media. We leverage IBM who has the very best of the best. They [Obama] don’t dominate technology, but they dominate technology PR.

I have no idea what IBM, or Microsoft did on this job -- we'll keep looking.

My constant blogging and commenting about this situation has amounted to exactly the reverse of what Zac is saying here. He thinks Obama had the hubris because they put it all inhouse and thought they were the only ones who understood big data and social media.

But...it turned out Zac had the hubris (geeks always do) for thinking Obama was wrong to keep it house. As to which of them teams had better understanding of "big data" -- well, that remains to be seen. Looks like Obama does; he won. Winning is only about big data these days and it's not surprising that this concept breaks and that someday, it will be jettisoned, hopefully not violently by angry people with pitchforks and torches who feel disenfranchised by digital gurus.

Pando Daily further reported on Zac's thinking and it is here for the first time -- startlingly -- that I see Moffatt's own interior thinking as he tells us that he had to overcome reticence in himself about hiring from among Obama's old campaign people. Again, we see the "inhouse" versus "outsource" tension:

At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, tech people I talked to approvingly described Obama’s digital team as a “startup within a startup.” Rather than outsource the building of various tools to other companies, it has developed everything in-house.

When I put that claim to Moffatt, however, he protests that the opposite is true. The Obama campaign, he asserts, is more like government. “They’ve pulled everything together and determined that they can do everything best,” he says. “We actually function like a startup. We are finding the best minds and best companies, but if something doesn’t work it’s easy for us to iterate and pivot into a new direction.” By relying on in-house tools, you can very quickly get lumped with cumbersome legacy items that becomes costly over time. “For me, it looks much more like central planning than it does anything else.”

Yet the complaints I've heard from Romney volunteers and poll watchers are that they felt the Romney campaign was too centralized and chilly toward local leaders, and that when Orca failed, it was precisely because it was so centralized, and forcing serial processing and not parallel processing.

Certainly, Moffatt’s team has made strong use of startups. It works with Rally.org for fundraising, Tout for shortform video, Square for field donations, and Eventbrite for, well, guess. Moffatt says Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all been “amazing” partners, to the point where people from those companies are almost like embedded staff on the campaign. The hardest decision for Moffatt to make, however, was signing up to use Optimizely for “A/B” testing. Optimizely was started by former Google employee Dan Siroker, who was director of analytics for Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Once I got over myself, I was able to do that,” Moffatt says with a wry laugh.

Within the Romney campaign, digital’s importance has never been called into question. Two weeks ago, the campaign passed 20 million voter contacts – that’s eight times as many phone calls as were placed at the same time during the John McCain campaign in 2008. Digital, in other words, has proven its scale and flexibility beyond doubt. “Those two have married up to allow us to produce an 800 percent lift, which is really kind of the impressive point,” Moffatt says. “People are always like, ‘Oh does it work?’ I mean, yeah, it works – that’s about as tangible an example as you can see.”

But it didn't work. And Moffatt maybe shouldn't have gotten over himself. He might actually have done better to build it inhouse with very gung-ho reliable people who weren't mined from the opposition team.

This is both about a concept for software productions, and about how to win a campaign, and today they are merged.

Sure, Obama's plan sounds to me awfully socialist and Bolshevik, even, secretive and centralized with only the cadres. Romney's plan seemed more market-oriented and merit-driven rather than comrade-driven, the bazaar rather than the cathedral.

Yet in the end, that jumble of supposed merit-based market-delivered capacities broke badly, because they didn't have spirit.

Former Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) employee Dan Siroker joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and became the director of analytics, coming up with the idea for the technology that would better target voters during the campaign.

In my many years living inside what may be the world's largest open source/proprietary combination software project involving ordinary people in the world -- Second Life -- I came to loathe the A/B test stuff. Not because I somehow don't accept "science" and "marketing principles". But because the principles were applied to small samples over short periods of time and didn't always make sense. The metrics were also artificially contrived. They were political, like everything in life.

Digital nerds often look for "conversion". How many sign-ups lead to how many hours on line lead to how many premium accounts with a monthly subscription. They pick things they can measure and care about such as revenue for their coffers or concurrency that they can show off to their fellow geek friends and don't look at other things. Like the virtual worlds GDP. Like the amount of money spent per hour, regardless of membership status. Like how many signups who bought content or made friends retained and their prospects for higher expenditures.

In any event, Romney's splash page probably got 100 times more scrutiny that secondlife.com which has been a subject of ENDLESS debate over the 10 years it has eternally been in beta -- and of course with real-life consequences.

But sometimes I find that the 20-somethings working in these digital agencies are really only finding out what their co-workers and friends think of things and serving up a big dollop of "Works On My Machine" along side it. I could endlessly describe why the websites and apps, which I signed up for, didn't work for me, but who cares? I'm the demographic they think is thrilled with the notion that maybe I could have dinner with George Clooney -- i.e. Paul Ryan lol -- if I donate only $3.

Huge money is at stake. Open Secrets site shows us a budget of $17 million for Targeted Victory. You know, that's a lot of social media work. And for that price tag, you should have apps that work and better repartees on Twitter. And I believe that was unavailable because Romney supporters were not on the job.

My hunch is that in these half dozen companies around the failed Romney campaign there is some morning-after soul-searching and some executives worried about how they look over this loss, especially because of Orca, which taints the whole thing in tech terms. And they are either going to double down and decide they will continue to serve Republican campaigns even with Democratic help, or they are looking around for how they can ensure better team spirit if the top CEOs themselves are Republicans. Maybe some employees are packing their bags -- who wants to work in a firm that serves Republicans when they've just lost? If it's a firm that serves beverage companies, lawn-mower manufacturers, universities and hospitals, AND political campaigns -- with a huge diverse menu like Amazon.com or IBM -- they can weather it.

But they're going to be thinking about this, I'm sure. And not because of my blog, but because the country has been deeply polarized by the Community-Organizer-in-Chief.

Moffatt spent the whole campaign saying why Obama was wrong, and his campaign techniques were right, as interviews like this tell us. Yet they didn't work. Somehow, when you have the idea that "I can't help it if people go to MittRomney.com and then go somewhere else" -- you havn't realized that your job is to make sure they do stay there.

Some Conspiracy Gal: Romney's ORCA system failed not due to incompetence, but instead liberal programmer sabotage. Bonus: includes totally "not racist" accusation of a specific developer being a "likely Obama voter"

The rule there is that if you are Talking Points Memo or American Thinker or Slate, some established blog, you get a logo and a mention of that blog; if you're just a little guy like me, you get called a name.

Cruise through the comments and you'll get a feeling for the Second Life/Sluniverse/Second Citizen sort of atmosphere -- you'll recognize my RL picture, my avatar name, etc.

All of these people sound exactly like Cristiano Midnight and about 50 Woodburies on Sluniverse.

My reply -- to them, and posters at Ars Technica, who at least are 10 times more intelligent and civil.

Hello, Flies

I had never heard of Fark before about 5000 of you deluged my blog, but I guess you're sort of like a Redditt or 4chan? Excuse me, my glasses seem to be broken.

First, I see that nearly all of you have anonymous forums names, while I'm using my real name and my real name and avatar names are linked. Kinda unfair fight, eh? I notice that it enables you to find my real-life picture and post it and ridicule me, after first guessing that I might be overweight. It's been falsely said that I was the real estate queen in Second Life bombarded with the penises -- in fact that was Anshe Chung but I was involved in that story as well because the griefer spoofed my name and account using my email address and made some people think that attack was done by me (later this was cleared up completely when the real culprit came forward and was also banned).

Second Life has taught me a lot about how insecure dweebs on the Internet behave, and Fark has tended to reinforce those lessons. None of you can be linked to your RL pictures, although some of you are undoubtedly obese; no one can know you're a dog even as you gawk at me. Fun, eh?

I happen to have a male avatar in Second Life because I have the freedom to do so in a virtual world. Are you against people having freedom on the Internet? I have no doubt that out of the 5000 people deluging my blog, at least a few have made female alts in online games and may even be ashamed of this.

If in fact you chose your anonymous handles because you don't want to be judged by your RL looks or affiliations and want to be free to comment in an autonomous realm of pure thought, then why aren't you according the same courtesy to me, and just dealing with what I write and my ideas? The reason I've added a "Google Witch-Hunters" note to my page here is because I get tired of the hysterical caricatures drawn of me because my ideas dissent from the geek status quo on issues like open source software or Internet governance.

But these firms have an awful lot of power and money, as a Bloomberg news report illustrates, and they have an awful lot of control over our public commons and democratic process now. That's why I ask questions about them.

We know about the CIA chief's mistress and their emails; but we can't seem to find out who coded Orca, you know? Why is that? Ars Technica, which has done the best reporting on this, is reticent about naming names, and has given Zac Moffett, digital director of the Romney campaign, a very soft touch in interviewing him -- Sean Gallagher is protecting one of his own tribe there. That's why I ask questions and keep asking questions because I don't believe tech writers will write critically enough of their fellow geeks.

Zac Moffet's firm -- from which he was temporarily on leave for the campaign -- is Targeting Victory. That's why people assumed (and I wasn't the first) that they'd either have coded Orca *or know about it*. Again: this firm isn't irrelevant to the story because it's Zac's firm. It's not clear if he will return to it after this debacle, but it's his firm.

Zac Moffet -- from Targeting Victory, featured on their web page -- gave an interview to PBS bragging about his digital work for Romney and about Orca about people "off the grid," i.e. not reachable by traditional TV. One in three voters is not reachable by a TV ad. "It has to scale," says Michael Beach, who worked with Moffet on the digital side of the campaign -- which really is the entire campaign these days.

I wrote a blog *asking questions about this* because that's what bloggers do to try to get at the truth. When it turned out Targeted Victory had *not* coded Orca, I updated my blog with additions and corrections, but I certainly pointed out that lots of questions were still in order. Um, do you do that every time you write something outdated, incorrect or false about someone on Fark?

And it's not as if the spotlight should be removed from TV now just because they didn't code Orca. After all, they were responsible for another failed ap -- the "VP pick" ap. That was much ballyhooed and failed -- for reasons that seem a combination of technical and managerial -- the regular media scooped it so that the entire gimmick flopped -- those waiting on this ap to give them the news were the last to know (it served as a data-scraping tool).

Let's leave aside the issue of whether anyone likes these candidates or not, and again, leave aside the issue of whether Romney might have done better if they were less incompetent.

What's operative here is that before, people running for political office only had to count on a few big television networks professionally organized and trained to follow them, along with radio and newspapers. These media outlets were well aware that they had to do the job serving the public interest. They tried to be fair, for better or worse. There were also outlets that had a known variety of known political leanings that came as no surprise.

Today, all that is up-ended, as they have to wade out into a storm of social media, and depend on various start-ups and up-starts in these Silicon Valley operations to guide them through these digital storms. These firms are large and small, known and unknown, but they are like shadowy middlemen between the mainstream and new media outlets and the candidates -- they are like Madison Avenue advertising firms now moved into politics, with vast Internet reach.

Now a little firm like Targeted Victory is like a big TV station and can reach millions of people using the tools of social media and blogs. So it's more than fine to ask for *accountability* of such people in this process. (Targeted Victory is not in Silicon Valley, but is in Alexandria, VA, but has the culture of that kind of organization in California as we know from Moffett's numerous boisterous and bragging interviews.)

When I found out that in this organization top-heavy with managers and marketers and only two devs and a program manager, one of the devs was Al Gore's former dev, I rightly and legitimately asked the question of how this could work out in a firm that mainly took on Republican campaigns.

And when I saw that the other dev was black, I noted that he was very likely an Obama voter, and asked how that would work out for Republican campaigns. I noted that making that observation is not racist, because whenever you mention race, people are nervous and hysterical and looking for a way to discredit your ideas and invoke racism.

But it's not racism, it's a report: we're told reliably that 96% of black people voted for Obama. They did.

Commenting legitimately on this fact on a blog on political affiliations isn't urging anybody to be kicked out of a job, discriminated against or lynched. God forbid. That would be crazy. Nor -- again -- would commenting on this fact of political life mean that minorities in and around the programming for Romney are suspect of sabotage and "lost it for Romney". Obviously, the reasons for Romney's loss are both more grand and more complex.

But it is saying that maybe they aren't suited to the job of running Republican campaigns.

If Newt Gingirch's dev promised he'd really help on the Obama back end, would you really believe him? Of course not. If Michelle Bachmann's dev was in the firm that took Obama's digital work up -- would you worry? You would. If a WASP millionaire with a double last-name and an expensive suit sailed up in his yacht and said he'd like to work for the Democrats, wouldn't someone ask about the 1 percent? They would. Hatred of the rich is big.

Now, the GOP desperately needs to modernize (and so does its ecosphere of publications and websites -- so far we've only see Red State say they are ready to drain the swamp of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck or the birthers). And they need to recruit and hire for campaigns more blacks and Hispanics and women and LGBT and other minorities. How will they do that? I don't belong to this party so it's not my problem, but I care enough about diversity of political opinion, not just diversity of races to ask the question: what do we do in a democratic society when race is now a marker for a very defined political belief system? I didn't make that so by my blog or observations; Obama and his campaign managers and the media made it so.

As we learned on G+ today, Sergei Brin would solve this problem by having no political parties in some sort of utopia of lovely independents covering independently in name and spirit. I roll my eyes 360%. The first thing that would happen under such a regime -- and a regime it would be -- is that those helpful coders in the comments would create a Google-run, Internet-based "voting" system that would just have people vote up issues with "likes" (and never vote no) -- on propositions that the nice people at Google would frame (or say, change.org). That would in fact be totalitarianism, not freedom, but I don't doubt for a minute that you Farkians would find it quite compatible with your cultural style and politics.

There's the larger issue, too, of the left-leaning and libertarian geek class. And to comment on this reality for our lives isn't to whistle for a witch-hunt or believe in loony conspiracies, it's to ask how we can have pluralism in our politics. How can we trust the managers of voting systems? How can we expect that a GOTV campaign will *work* for the people who gave up their time and treasure to get involved in the elections?

A fellow on Ars Technica said that he feared telling me the names of the Orca developers because a loon who thinks they were to blame for Romney's loss will come and assassinate them. Really, guys? That sounds like a total trumped-up excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your coding messes. He invoked Congressman Gifford's wounding and the killing of her aids and constituents. But Giffords wasn't shot by a member of the Tea Party, but by a loon. Let's get a grip here: Republican campaigns -- the only opposition party we have now to the party of power -- have to rely on people who are afraid of being assassinated if their shoddy programming is exposed? Good Lord, that's preposterous.

Orca didn't work, and it's more than fine to ask why, and to seek accountability not only from Zac Moffett, who is tap-dancing around this like Fred Astaire, but all the 80 people in his digital workshop with the bean-bag chairs, and from the Orca developers and Targeted Victory. Did they treat this with cynicism and even neglect that amounts to sabotage because their hearts weren't in a Romney victory? Well? I know I'm asking the right hearts-and-minds question, and soon it won't be just me asking it, but every single board room where big money was involved in this campaign will be asking it -- in part because your mob helped get the word out. Thanks!

Why indeed is Al Gore's dev doing Romney's ap work? How the hell does something like that happen?

But more to the point, why did Orca fail?

Now herr -- I get it that software projects have various stages, having taken part in them time and again. And derr -- that involves testing and reiteration and bug-elimination and all the rest. Many comments here talk about short time frames, the methodology of software, with that arrogant nastiness that assumes nobody knows how that works -- when most people are taking part in live beta experiments 24/7 just by being on Twitter or Facebook and following their "issues".

From what we gather from comments on forums, these digital wunderkind coding Orca used the Agile software cult for their work. No surprise at the result there! Agile creates an alternative universe of fake user questions completely untethered from real users, and creates Stakhanovite work plans with dictatorial personages running the show with "roles" assigned them by managers imbued with the cult. Maybe Obama used Agile systems and got results because he had the cult built in already around his persona. Romney couldn't because he didn't.

We haven't heard much about the mission or plan or schedule because nobody is talking. We only know what the guy himself responsible for the mess is telling us -- which is not how you get to the bottom of a news story. Moffett says they tested in Boston, but not the nation.

Yet from what I gather talking to ordinary party activists in various states, and from what I see on their blogs, a complaint was about the over-centralization of this campaign, with all paths leading to Boston, and not enough local autonomy to run the Romney franchise in local conditions. That's not a software problem, except it is; it comes out of the dictatorial software management cults that can hold sway in an organization and become too rigid to adjust to humans.

As I've noted in my past blog, the Indian firm said to be the outsource firm denies that it was involve. Accenture won't comment. These big consulting firms are hugely skilled and covering their trail and keeping their own social media footprint invisible -- especially with Google bombing.

Say, you could organize a Fark-scapade to somebody's blog ridiculing them on the Internet, and you're done, you know? Very easy to manipulate masses in places like this, I see it all the time from 4chan or somethingawful.com

You people aren't stampeded and manipulated, are you? You all think for yourselves right?

11/10/2012

Katrin Verclas has picked up that eternal whining lament, occasionally found on TechCrunch and other tech publications, of why women in tech are not recognized, put on top 10 lists, honoured, feted, and appreciated. Why can't all those nerds in the usual sausage fests open up some space for the opposite sex?

And somebody like Mike Arrington or Robert Scoble always end up gently telling them that it's because, well, there aren't many women in tech. When there are more of them, they will get on lists. Some of them already are. Like Marissa Meyer, former Google VP and now CEO of Yahoo, who is mainly famous now for going on maternity leave not long after accepting the job, and now being widely rumoured to be able to "have it all". Let's hope she has a "good baby". (Everything depends on whether you have a "good baby," i.e. without colic who sleeps through the night.)

My answer below. Basically, using tokenism doesn't work to bring about the desired goals, and if anything, retards progress because it simulates outcomes that didn't arrive naturally and perpetuates the illusion.

But here's an interesting thing about Katrin herself -- she left her own start-up after 7 years and moved to a political organization, the National Democratic Institute. Naturally, she thinks to patronize a leader of her own workplace (ND) in her list -- which is of course, how Silicon Valley works.

And why there aren't more women on lists -- they don't get into the schmoozing with the men at all the barcamps or after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt or whatever it is... There were so many men at the after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt -- I was one of the very few women several years running -- that I wondered if they shouldn't deliberately import more women from computer classes at Columbia and NYU with free passes. But then...that would be tacky, wouldn't it?

One of the ways that women get into tech is, well, just getting into tech. I know a number of women coders in Second Life and related virtual worlds and online games who studied hard, worked hard, worked there way up. How else can it be done, really? Sleeping your way to the top can't work when it comes to knowing technology, you have to know and do the technology.

And then, take Sarah Lacy, once at Business Week and then at TechCrunch, who despite being dissed severely by Mark Zuckerberg at SWSX held on to her guns. And then left TechCrunch herself, to start her own publication, pandodaily.com. She just does it. It's hard. But by staying the course and writing and doing what you like you can make your world. She's not a technologist. But writing *about* technology does take a lot of technical language and there are also very few women in tech journalism! (Well, there is the Arianna-in-training, Alexia Tsotsis...)

So...Katrin (@katrinskaya) is now at National Democratic Institute, the Democratic Party's institute for supporting democracy abroad, as "senior manager for innovation" -- a contrived new job of the sort you find at many NGOs today, where those older, greyer male officials are scared that they aren't keeping up with the new phenomena, and invent jobs like this -- that foundations are happy to support because they're all worried about being relevant, too.

The people in these nouveau media and "strategic communications" jobs increasingly hold the power in organizations as social media *is* the power -- and the jobs pay more than the old PR jobs they've replaced. They often have fancier titles, like "CCO" for "chief communications officer" on par with CEO, CFO, CTO.

Katrin founded the wildly-feted Mobile Active and basically went around telling everybody that they could have revolutions using mobile phones and also that they'd make it safe enough for everybody to do so with various "aps". And they probably do in some places (except, oh, Belarus.) Mobile Active is part of, or a platform for, the "participatory budget cult" -- which in New York City takes the form of a Working Families cult extension. You go invade city councils and sit alongside elected officials and badger them for your special interests -- like $100,000 for app developers lol -- and then you bypass the voters and make the officials redundant, too. Someday, somebody will notice the awfulness of "participatory budgeting," a Marxian mash, and trash it properly -- I don't have time now.

I recall clashing with Verclas a number of times on Twitter in the earlier days (I've been on Twitter about one week longer than she on my Prokofy account) -- or at Tech@State because she is a radical supporter of the whole open source software tech cult, Twitter revolutions, etc. and I'm quite skeptical of all this. She's a vehement fighter and she then ends up telling someone who fights back that they are a "troll" blah blah. (As she did in this very discussion). I don't care. But...It's troubling when people with radical tech utopian ideologies invade the world of more mainstream NGOs. This is like Rebecca MacKinnon (@rmack) on the board of Committee to Protect Journalists. Katinskaya is especially voluble on LiberationTech.

The question is whether these more mainstream organizations with solid understanding of human rights and international law will moderate the radicalizing tendencies of these gals, or whether they will radicalize the organizations they get into. I fear the latter, as they are pushed towards taking positions against SOPA/PIPA/CISPA (so far CPJ has resisted, but just barely, and the thread could break at any minute). Now that we're in for Obama II, these types are unstoppable. I expect a certain amoung of shake-up in Gov 2.0 circles and the White House Office of Science and Technology and Hillicon and these other centres of power -- but then we'll see even more funding and more power for them.

And, what is it that makes someone like Verclas leave a start-up like MobileActive built around her own persona that will only languish after she leaves? In fact, collapse after she leaves, as she explains, as it has "worked itself out of a job" in a world where there are a zillion mobile tech things now. (It's like Alec Ross' organization to empower local economies whose website hasn't been updated since he took office).

Well, I think the answer is simple: power. Fooling around in a little NGO that constantly needs fund-raising and has to compete with now 100s of other such groups with more tech expertise as she herself admits is just not going to cut it for someone who is ambitious. And something like NDI lets you become a Washington insider close to those in power while going around doing good developing democracies -- in that method that the US loves so well (especially under the Clintons) -- via elections (which in many places, is not how you get real democracy anyway...)

I'm skeptical of the things she has worked on like SMS data collection for election monitoring. Why? Because I think this job has to be done not by nearly-created tekkie NGOs (like Golos), but by building up local independent media, often suffering in oppressive countries, and making it safe and easy for them to do exit polls as part of their overall role of investigative reporting and keeping officials' feet to the fire. And I think those most motivated in exit polling, like party-affiliated institutes in countries abroad, also need empowerment. What the SMS/tech/mobile phone approach does is create a meta-layer of sophisticates who are outside the process and even whine that they are "beyond" politics (in Russia they are particularly good at this fiction). So they don't serve people. They serve themselves. Mitt Romney, one of the richest people in the country with a whole political machine of top-paid people behind him, had trouble with his grand ORCA scheme for collecting mobile exit poll data. How much more the case for somebody in Azerbaijan.

My reply to her piece:

Katrin,
you've cited these 10 women as "innovators in democracy," but you don't
say anything actually innovative that they've done. They may all be
great people, and they have important titles and credentials, but most
of them just look like the sort of female caretakers of NGOs that
bigger, more egotistical, more famous men put at the helm of their
organizations to do the donkey work -- like Jimmy Wales re: the
Wikimedia Foundation, or for that matter, or Tim Armstrong of CEO re:
even the headstrong Arianna Huffington. Ginny Hunt may be an
inside-the-Valley celeb, but the public never heard of her.
"Spearheading" democracy initiatives at Google (like the campaign
against SOPA) are managed by, not conceived by, someone like Ginny Hunt
-- Larry and Sergei decide all the big things there, you know?

Again, if the list is about *innovation* you have to put people who
aren't just social media managers, because social media itself by itself
isn't innovative anymore. You have to be doing something *with it*.
Now, you didn't mention Marissa Meyer, formerly of Google, who went to
Yahoo. And I wouldn't put her on the democracy list, as just going to
Yahoo isn't about democracy, but about....well, some other industry or
personal goal. But she belongs on *some* list for her abilities.

Susan Crawford is on everybody's committee and has written an
important paper but again, you're not spelling out the case for
*democracy innovation*.

The Sunlight Foundation is a lobbying organization for Silicon Valley
in Washington. It is a part of the democratic process, yes. But it
just lobbies for Silicon Valley interests, it isn't empowering people.

I have a lot of respect for Madeleine Albright and she is definitely
an innovator in history, but it really isn't the case that you could say
she is "at the forefront of changing the landscape of governance,
media, and technology". Does she even tweet?

I care for Hillary Clinton much more than Alec Ross, but he more
properly belongs on the list of this nature as she Clinton has not
headed any program specifically herself; "21st Century Diplomacy" is a
bureaucratic branding exercise involving a lot of people, not just Ross.
And in general, it's time for Ross to come off these lists as he has
not done anything *lately*.

Re: Catherine Bracy: Running Obama's political campaign isn't about
democracy for us all now, is it? It's partisan. And in general, the left
(you) haven't told us anything about what sooper kool stuff Obama did
in his social media campaigns to win -- you (the left media) have only
trashed ORCA and Romney's failures. So spell out what you think she
brought to the table other than just being your cool friend.

The Prime Minister of Iceland sounds like she's just engaged in a
branding exercise, too -- constitutional reform isn't achieved on
Twitter and Facebook, it's achieved by elected officials, and that's how
it should be. Social media is a means to engage and call to account
elected representatives; it is not a brave new shiny replacement for
them, although TechPresident often sounds like it would like them to be.

So that leaves Reshma Saujani -- and if she empwered girls to code, that would indeed be helping democracy and technology.

The reply you got is legitimate. That's because you cannot bring
about equality for women by using the Soviet-style identity politics so
beloved of Marxists -- let's have 1 Estonian and 1 Udmurtian and 7
mothers of ten children who are milkmaids. They don't bring about actual
democracy just by being from a Chinese menu. Just adding forcibly the
female gender doesn't mean a damn thing: look at the UN Security Council
now. For the first time in history, it has a whopping three women on it
-- ambassadors of US, Brazil, and Ghana. This has made not *one whit of
difference* in terms of the world's wars, its ability to bring peace or
help the poor. And there you have it.

Instead of trying to get on the boys' list, you could start your own,
but...is it really worth it? Who cares? Only Alec Ross. Just do good
work.